Richard Shiffrin
American cognitive scientist at Indiana University
American cognitive scientist who co-authored the 1968 multi-store model of memory with Richard Atkinson and later built formal models of recall and recognition, including SAM and REM, at Indiana University.
Why this person matters
Shiffrin completed his PhD at Stanford in 1968, the year of the chapter he wrote with Atkinson, his doctoral adviser. His later work moved from describing memory stores to formal models of how memories are searched and recognised, developed with collaborators such as Jeroen Raaijmakers and Mark Steyvers.
Main contributions
The 1968 modal model with Atkinson
As a doctoral student at Stanford he developed with Richard Atkinson a model of memory components and the control processes that operate on them. The 1968 chapter is a joint work, and the model is named for both authors.
SAM, a search model of recall
With Jeroen Raaijmakers he developed Search of Associative Memory (SAM), which models retrieval from long-term memory as a search with cycles of sampling and recovery. It was first presented in a 1980 chapter and published in Psychological Review in 1981; Gillund and Shiffrin extended it to recognition in 1984.
REM, a model of recognition
With Mark Steyvers he introduced Retrieving Effectively from Memory (REM) in 1997. It added featural representations to capture similarity among memory items and extended the theory to implicit memory.
Context and limits
The model credited to him and Atkinson has been revised by many researchers. The sensory register was later folded into the short-term store, and working memory and levels-of-processing accounts challenged the single short-term store and the emphasis on rehearsal. SAM is itself a later revision with two stores and no sensory store, and it has difficulty with some long-term recency and contiguity effects.
In your introductory course
Memory.He appears in the memory chapter through the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, usually presented before working memory and levels of processing, which revise it.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 8.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1968
He completed his PhD at Stanford, published the memory chapter with Richard Atkinson, and began his career at Indiana University.
- 1981
He and Jeroen Raaijmakers published the SAM model in Psychological Review, after presenting it in a 1980 chapter.
- 1995
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
- 1997
He and Mark Steyvers introduced the REM model.
Sources
- Indiana University Bloomington, Richard Shiffrin faculty pageUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Indiana University, Honors and Awards: Richard M. ShiffrinUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- University of Amsterdam, Album Academicum: R. M. ShiffrinUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Yale Class of 1964, class news: Richard ShiffrinSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- J. G. W. Raaijmakers, research page (University of Amsterdam), SAM referencesUniversity. Abstract inspected.
- Society for Mathematical Psychology, Richard Shiffrin wins Lifetime Achievement AwardSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Atkinson-Shiffrin memory modelReference work. Reference article inspected.